gangs

Last Thursday, I wrote the following concerning some Chicago Tribune reader correspondence entitled “Letter: I’m leaving Chicago and I’m never coming back”:

I remain optimistic about the long-term prospects for the “Windy City.” That being said, I do believe conditions in the city will erode before improving again. For those dead set on remaining in town, please do yourself a favor and take a good, hard look at your financial and personal safety capabilities for successfully navigating any “storm” that may lie ahead. For example, how do your finances look with the real prospect of future tax hits down the road?

More later…

Later is today- as least as that bit about “personal safety capabilities” is concerned.

Regular readers of Survival And Prosperity know that the physical well-being of Chicagoans in the face of growing criminal threats has been a priority of this blog since its inception. A recent post on the popular Chicago police blog Second City Cop and a just-released report from the University of Chicago Crime Lab seem to justify such concern.

“SCC” posted the following on Second City Cop on December 29, which suggests the Chicago Police Department is becoming increasingly “fetal”:

Yesterday, the University of Chicago Crime Lab released a report entitled Gun Violence In Chicago, 2016, which utilized data obtained from the Chicago Police Department and other sources “to provide a more complete picture of the change in our city’s crime problem in 2016.”

The “change” was disturbing. From the report’s “Introduction”:

Between 2015 and 2016, Chicago experienced 58 percent more homicides and 43 percent more non-fatal shootings. Annual increases of this size are not unprecedented among American cities, particularly in recent years, but are rare for a city of Chicago’s size. One striking feature of Chicago’s increase in gun violence is how sudden it was: as of December 2015, there was no indication that gun violence was on the verge of rising sharply. But in January 2016, homicides and shootings surged relative to their 2015 levels and remained higher in almost every month that followed, threatening 20 years of progress on violent crime in Chicago…

What changed in Chicago was not so much the nature of our violence problem, but rather its prevalence. Most murders involved guns, occurred in public places, and stemmed from what police believe was some sort of altercation. This violence continues to be very regressive in its impact, disproportionately affecting the city’s most disadvantaged residents. Most gun violence victims and suspects were African American men, more often than not having had some prior encounter with the criminal justice system.

Compared to other cities, a larger share of homicide suspects in Chicago consists of adolescents, although the majority of all homicide suspects are in their 20s or older. The increase in gun violence occurred disproportionately in several disadvantaged neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides, which now account for an even larger share of the city’s homicides. Another change is that from 2015 to 2016, the share of homicides that CPD believes stemmed from an altercation, as well as the share of homicide offenders who were recorded by CPD as having a gang affiliation, seemed to decline…

(Editor’s note: Bold added for emphasis)

“The share of homicide offenders who were recorded by CPD as having a gang affiliation, seemed to decline”

And here I was parnanoid about the tens of thousands of gang bangers infesting the city.

Further suggesting Chicagoans’ really need to look after their personal safety were these nuggets found within the report:

-“In 2016, 77 percent of gun homicides and shootings took place on the street or in an alley, up from 75 percent in 2015…”

-“Around 64 percent of homicides in 2016 were described by CPD as stemming from an altercation, down from 74 percent in 2015. Unless there was a change in how CPD recorded the circumstances of homicides from 2015 to 2016, this suggests that homicides stemming from other motivations increased more rapidly (by 121 percent) than did homicides stemming from an altercation (by 35 percent)…”

-“Individuals arrested for a homicide or shooting in Chicago in 2016 and 2015 had similar prior criminal records: around 90 percent had at least one prior arrest, approximately 50 percent had a prior arrest for a violent crime specifically, and almost 40 percent had a prior gun arrest. The average person arrested for a homicide or shooting in both years had nearly 12 prior arrests, with almost 45 percent having had more than 10 prior arrests, and almost 20 percent having had more than 20 prior arrests…”

-“The share of offenders with a current or prior gang affiliation, as noted by CPD, declined from 73 percent in 2015 to 67 percent in 2016, suggesting that individuals not affiliated with gangs may have been overrepresented among those driving the increase in violence…”

-“In 2016, Chicago police made 24 percent fewer arrests than in 2015, accelerating the steady downward trend in arrests the city has seen in recent years…”

-“Chicago police recorded over 80 percent fewer stops in January 2016 than they had in November 2015. This drop, from an average of over 50,000 stops per month in 2015 (through November) to approximately 10,000 stops per month starting in early 2016, began a few months before rates of gun violence in Chicago began to increase. What caused the decline is itself unclear. Several frequently-mentioned candidate explanations—the release of video footage showing the shooting by a CPD officer of teenager Laquan McDonald, announcement of a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation of CPD, implementation of an agreement between the City and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) concerning street stops, and a new state law regarding street stops—all happened essentially within a few weeks of each other in late 2015 and early 2016…”

More on Chicago and personal safety later. In the meantime, head on over to the University of Chicago Crime Lab website here to read their entire report (.pdf file). It’s enlightening, to say the least.

Yesterday morning while watching the local news I spotted Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson on WGN-TV (Chicago Channel 9) talking about the city’s gun violence. From his exchange with WGN’s Robin Baumgarten and Larry Potash:

BAUMGARTEN: So I heard you mention at the Union Club when you spoke earlier this week that it’s basically about 1,000 gang members or offenders that are causing all these problems. Now when people hear that- why don’t you go arrest those guys? Or are they going to jail and getting back out? What’s happening?
JOHNSON: Well, we’ve gotten real good at predicting who these individuals will be. Unfortunately, we have to work within the framework of a little piece of paper called the Constitution. So we actually have to wait until they do something. So that list that we have is not really for enforcement, but it’s just more of an FYI so we know who the perpetrators are.
POTASH: Lawmakers have been working on a bill to kind of stiffen the penalties for gun possession. What is taking so long with that?
JOHNSON: So we, I’m optimistic that we’ll have it done at the beginning of the year. But in terms of what’s taking so long? I guess they just want to get the language of it right. Because it’s more important to get it right than to rush through it. But we have to do something. Because most of our violence in Chicago is perpetrated by repeat gun offenders. And until we change that culture, that mentality, we’re going to see the same things keep cycling through.
BAUMGARTEN: So ideally what would you like to see, or what is the goal? To have someone who has a gun go to jail for how long? What’s the goal?
JOHNSON: So with this particular piece of legislation, we’re not changing the sentencing years. What we’re doing is giving our judicial partners the wherewithal to be able to sentence them somewhere between the mid-range to high-end of the sentencing guideline, which will be I think the high-end is maybe 14 years. Mid-range will be about 6 years.
POTASH: And why wouldn’t they be doing that already?
JOHNSON: Well, I can’t answer that. That’s a question- that’s a million dollar question. But the fact of it is though we do have to do a better job of holding these individuals accountable for their gun crimes…

November saw murders in Chicago double from last year. WGN-TV’s Nancy Loo reported this morning:

The latest number only add to an already deadly year. Likely, the worst in two decades. But the numbers for November alone are alarming. According to Chicago Police, there were 77 murders in November- nearly double from last year. And there was a total of 389 shooting victims- that’s 188 more than last November. The murder total for last month is actually more than that of 2014 and 2015 combined. Police say the current violence is fueled by gangs, largely within five police districts on the South and West sides…

(Editor’s note: Bold added for emphasis)

“Murders in Chicago more than doubled in November, police say”
WGN-TV Video

“Every cop on the street knows who’s doing the killing- it’s the gang members and felons these same fearless politicians refuse to prosecute and throw in prison. And all these anti-gun politicians have to offer is gun control… and then when that doesn’t work, more gun control.

You politicians don’t represent these communities- you’re political parasites, where your political career thrives on exploiting the conditions in these places.

Because if you were trying to save lives, you’d be having a national day of action to demonstrate ways to stop the gang violence in the inner city, not how to come up with more laws that haven’t worked and that you don’t enforce in the first place…”

I thought there was an uptick in the number of local expressway shootings lately. Frank Main reported on the Chicago Sun-Times website yesterday:

Expressway shootings have become a major problem. They not only threaten the lives of motorists, but they have also caused frequent traffic jams as police shut down the expressways to investigate them.

In 2010, there were six shootings on Chicago-area expressways.

Last year, there were 18.

And so far this year, there have been 25…

In the past two years, one person was killed and 23 people were wounded in the shootings, according to the Illinois State Police.

Most of the shootings don’t appear to stem from road rage, said Sgt. Clare Pfotenhauer, a spokeswoman for the state police. Usually, they involve gang conflicts, she said.

A law enforcement source said gang members follow their targets onto the Dan Ryan and Eisenhower expressways because they believe it’s easier to get away from police on the expressways than on neighborhood streets…

(Editor’s note: Bold added for emphasis)

I’ve logged a lot of hours on the Eisenhower over the years. Back in the late nineties, I was heading east on I-290 into the city when I noticed my girlfriend at the time was staring out the front passenger window at other vehicles. Just then what appeared to be a car full of gangbangers pulled up alongside of us. By the look on their faces, they weren’t too happy being stared at by some far west suburban white girl. Nothing came of the incident. However, living off the West Side at this time, I knew better than to stare at other vehicles and their occupants on certain stretches of Chicagoland roadway lest they consider “popping a cap in my ass” (a couple of years earlier while driving on I-43 in downtown Milwaukee I already had a handgun flashed at me), and gladly shared such concerns with this young lady later that day.

It was another violent Independence Day weekend in the city of Chicago. Peter Nickeas reported on the Chicago Tribune website this morning:

Shootings over the long Fourth of July weekend left 10 people dead and 54 others wounded.

Among those killed was a 7-year-old boy shot in the chest during an attack aimed at his father, according to police…

(Editor’s note: Bold added for emphasis)

The Chicago Sun-Times added this morning on their website:

Police said Sunday the bullet that fatally wounded 7-year-old Amari Brown on the Fourth of July was meant for his father…

The boy’s father, Antonio Brown, is a ranking gang member with 45 previous arrests and was not cooperating with police as of Sunday afternoon as they tried to find his son’s killer, Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported…

Security and self-defense are often on my mind these days. Even more so after reading the following yesterday on the website of Judicial Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative, non-partisan educational foundation. From their “Press Room”:

Judicial Watch today released 76 pages of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents revealing that as of April 26, 2014, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had released 165,900 convicted criminal aliens throughout the United States, including many convicted of such violent crimes as homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and aggravated assault. (Reports recently detailed that ICE released another 30,000 in the most recent fiscal year, which brings the grand total of known criminals released by the Obama administration to 195,900.)

The documents were released through a July 21, 2014, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:14-cv-01237)) filed by Judicial Watch…

As has been previously reported, and is evidenced in these documents, the 36,007 criminal aliens freed by ICE in 2013 were just the tip of the iceberg. In a DHS “Overview of ICE” document marked “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY,” the following figures are reported through April 26, 2014 [NOTE: “Final Order” indicates the illegal aliens were ordered to leave the country, but have not done so and remain free]:

• Non-Detained Final Order Convicted CRIMINAL 165,950
• Non-Detained Final Order NON CRIMINAL 706,950
• Non-Detained Final Order TOTAL 872,900